Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 2 April 2019

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Communications, Climate Action and Environment

Energy Plant Certification: Commission for the Regulation of Utilities

Dr. Paul McGowan:

I am not. I have no knowledge whatsoever of what the Senator has just said. We have new technical consultants under contract, who carried out the assessment and came up with the same view as the previous consultant. It was on that basis that the ultimate decision was made.

We use consultants because we have had, to date, 113 high-efficiency CHP applications from all sources. It would not be a sound resourcing decision to keep the range of engineering expertise we would need in-house to be able to assess such a diversity of technologies. We have a team that works on the applications but the engineering expertise is provided by external experts.